Unfortunately, we live in a world where practically everything is geared towards Windows.

For example, my son needs to use Photoshop for his profession. Although it can be used on-line, it's slow compared to a local installation. Some of the very specialist software he uses during the editing process is only available for Windows. So he's lumbered as far as changing systems is concerned.

Although it's possible to run some of this stuff via Wine, it's flaky at best and cannot be considered usable at a professional level.

But why people with "normal" computer needs continue to use Windows, is beyond me.

The problem with the NHS is, they've got very specialist equipment with bespoke programs written (often only) for XP and cannot change them. It would run into multi-millions of pounds they simple haven't got. Though simply using an up to date anti-virus and anti-malware program shouldn't be beyond them.

Now they've discovered the true cost of ignoring the inevitable.

What's the betting a few million will now be miraculously found from somewhere for a systems upgrade.

I used to work for a large company with many PCs, they were red hot on paying for licences on AV software, but less good on setting up the PCs. When I checked out the ones in our department none of them were set to update the AV automatically. The updates were hosted on the company Intranet and it needed a few easy tweaks to set. They had also never been around and updated the software despite paying for the latest versions, most of the versions installed were unsupported and one or two so old they were incompatible with the updates. Took me a while but I updated and reset the lot and no I wasn't in the IT dept.

I think they took the view that as most company PCs didn't have Internet access It didn't matter that much. I decided that as they all had Intranet that was shared with Internet users and E-mail that it did.

I wonder why it is that on this occasion at least Wales seems to have got away without any problems with it's NHS site. I assumed that as the Welsh NHS and the English one are much the same what would apply to one would apply to the other.

I work in the NHS, not one of the sites affected, but IT have been banging on about being aware that there were malicious email arriving on the network for the last few weeks and not to open them but just delete them.

I have received a few of these emails, two in particular which purportedly can from my boss with a couple of links on it which is worrying, it just didn't look right, so they got deleted. I can see that if someone is not paying attention it is so easy to click on a link without thinking and opens up all sorts of problems. The trouble is, the staff are so busy, their focus is on the patient, where it should be, so often IT is secondary to their concerns.

If that was true, we would all be using it. Linux is not trouble free, as your son (and millions of other people) has discovered. Photoshop is used by huge numbers of people - including me - on a regular basis, and it runs perfectly in Windows 10.

There's a reason why software companies don't develop for Linux in a big way, and it's a simple one - only five computers out of every 100 use it. That figure has increased over the past 10 years, but only by 2%.

The simple fact is that people prefer Windows to every other operating system, and by a big margin - MacOs is twice as popular as Linux, but it still only gets 10% of the market.

Some people say Linux is safer than Windows, but it isn't. The reason why you don't hear a lot about Linux vulnerabilities is that relatively speaking so few people use it. Flaws in Linux are there, but go undetected because nobody thinks it worth their while to exploit them. A potentially serious privilege escalation bug - CVE–2016–5195 (or 'Dirty Cow') - went undetected for nine years before it was spotted by the Linux community, and most Linux bugs exist for an average of five years before anyone does anything about them.

Dirty Cow is still sitting there, in huge numbers of Linux machines, because their users don't know anything about it.

Like the large majority of the world's computer users, I'll stick to good old Windows.